Red Tape Roadblocks Va. Aid

Tamara Dietrich

September 08, 2005|By TAMARA DIETRICH Daily Press

Williamsburg bus driver Keith Smith rumbled south toward New Orleans last Thursday with a sense of purpose and a feel for the mission.

"We were ready," Smith told me Tuesday, the day after he and five other drivers arrived back home with three chartered buses and 159 empty seats. "We were ready to bring people back." In the end, they didn't bring back a single bedraggled soul. Why? That depends on which pointing finger you're looking at.

Organizer and Oleta Coach Lines marketing director David Smith says he tried to line up support from local, state and federal governments. He thought he had it. But like too many initial efforts in this fiasco of hurricane relief, it got chewed up by bureaucracy.

FEMA says Virginia wasn't an official evacuation site. Virginia says it doesn't know why FEMA would turn the buses away. So where exactly was the logjam?

"Both pinning it on each other," Smith says.

Meanwhile, Williamsburg was left with hotels, schools, restaurants and a hospital on standby, 300 volunteers idling in its welcome wagon, 60 jobs waiting and a job fair in the works, donated food and clothing - "You name it, you have it," Smith says. "The only thing that we did not have was the green light from the government."

Somehow, other states managed to jump into the relief effort early on. A week ago, neighboring West Virginia was sending three C-130 planes to a base in San Antonio to bring back hundreds of refugees. Over the weekend, the governor of New Mexico declared a state of emergency and released $1 million to bring in and assist as many as 6,000. Albuquerque residents have donated so much cash, clothes, food, rooms and homes that the Red Cross actually had to ask them to stop. Arizona flew in thousands more; the mayor of Phoenix greeted them on the runway.

In the long list of states reaching out to Katrina victims over the past week, I've noticed Virginia jarringly absent. Finally, on Tuesday, Gov. Mark Warner announced that we are taking in 4,000 evacuees. Possibly more.

He explained in Wednesday's Daily Press that he didn't want to bring in evacuees early on, like other states, only to set them up in temporary convention centers. He wanted a more stable living situation where they could be "processed into communities."

First, that sounds exactly like what folks in Williamsburg already lined up. And second, it doesn't acknowledge that hundreds of thousands are sitting in shelters in other states and might jump at the chance to relocate - even temporarily - to a place like the Hampton Roads Convention Center.

"It's sad, because this is the state of presidents," Smith says. "I mean, presidents were born here. You'd think if anybody was together, it would be Virginia."

At least for Smith's nephew Keith, 26, the trip was far from a bust. His little convoy arrived Friday in time to herd together with a major convoy just outside the waterlogged city. They were fueled up by military tankers and pointed in the direction of the Superdome.

"They put us straight to work," he says. "I asked myself what was I getting myself into on the way there, and was burned out when I got there. But when I got in there and realized what I was doing and why I was doing it, it just kind of hit me, you know? Not everybody can do what I'm doing. And I don't need to take that for granted. A lot of people were in need."

En route to the Superdome, he said, he saw vehicles on fire, buildings in flames and houses in ruin. Trash everywhere. "It kind of reminded me of a Third World country," he says.

The evacuees looked the part. "Whatever you can imagine, that's exactly what it was like," Keith says. "Clothes are wet from walking through the water. The smell was unbearable. But we didn't think about that. We thought about what we were there to do.

"A lot of people were very grateful. Stopping us, thanking us, telling us how much they appreciated it. "The most disturbing thing was to see the people who were walking around through water with no place to go. Some people were asking, 'Can we get on the bus?' A lot of them were not able to get on. There was a line you had to get into."

Also disturbing, he says, was the confusion among rescuers. "No one was really in charge," Keith says. "The military was there directing buses and people, but nobody was there say, 'Hey, you all get on this bus, you all get on that bus.' Nobody really knew what was going on. People on our bus were asking, 'Are we going to this place or that place?' We just followed the other buses."

His exhausted passengers finally aboard, he tried to keep their spirits up for the eight-hour drive to Dallas. They were ready to comply.

"What we really wanted to do was make them feel comfortable. Put a smile on their faces," Keith says. "So we'd laugh and joke. They were very understanding. They were very easygoing. Some of them said they had never seen something this serious, this bad. They would never think something like this could happen in their own country."

I asked if he was referring to the hurricane or its aftermath. "All of it," he says. "Especially the aftermath."

David says his FEMA contract expired Friday, but he kept his drivers in Louisiana through the weekend, hoping for clearance at the last minute. By Sunday, he was calling them home. "I only had so much time to be persistent with the government to get some people on the buses," he says.

"It kind of made your heart sad," Keith says, "because you saw the faces of those you were helping and saw how grateful they were and wanted to do more. Kind of felt like a hero, you know? Kind of felt like a hero."